Thursday, April 26, 2007

The Huffington Post and Gernika

In their post titled Seventy Years After Gernika they have this paragraph that is a real lesson for today's generations about how wrong things can go when war mongers call the shots, check it out:

But within a few short years the murder of innocents from the air at Guernica was dwarfed by the 45,000 civilians killed in Hamburg, the 100,000 civilians killed in Dresden, the 130,000 killed in Tokyo, and the 280,000 killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

"The most powerful weapon of governments in raising armies," Zinn argues, "is the weapon of propaganda, of ideology. It must persuade young people, and their families, that though they may die, though they may lose arms or legs, or become blind, that it is done for the common good, for a noble cause, for democracy, for liberty, for God, for the country." Note the litany of reasons the Bush Administration gave for invading Iraq knowing its actions were going to kill tens of thousands of innocent people.

In early February 2003, a few days before Secretary of State Colin Powell gave his power-point presentation to the United Nations making the case that Saddam Hussein had "weapons of mass destruction," American officials demanded that a curtain be draped over the U.N.'s reproduction of Picasso's Guernica. They believed it would be inappropriate for Powell to make his pitch for aggressive war while standing in front of the 20th Century's most iconic protest against the inhumanity of war.

Now that the lies of the Bush Administration have been exposed -- from the WMDs and the Niger yellow cake, to the 9-11 links and even Jessica Lynch's Rambo story -- the Congress must begin investigating or impeaching every official who played a role in bringing the country to war.

Picasso's masterpiece inside the United Nations was there to give people the chance to think before plunging into another war. In the future, if diplomats want to throw a veil over this painting, we must firmly tell them that anything they have to say to the world's people can be said while standing in front of Guernica, or it doesn't need to be said at all.

How can we forget that José María Aznar, heir to the same regime responsible for the massacre at Gernika, was one of George W. Bush most ardent supporters in his case for war?

And how can we look the other way when we know that today the Partido Popular, a spawn of Franco's dictatorship, still calls the shots with the complicity of the PSOE when it comes to the negotiated solution to the Basque conflict?

But hey, when it comes to the Basques, no one dares to ask the tough questions.